Love

If it's what you say, I love it.

Saturday, November 26, 2016

Trump's Multipronged Strategy of Hate

I'm posting this two week old article by Rembert Browne about how white supremacy won the election for Trump not just because Rembert is one of the best writers out there, but because I really like how he phrased something I've been saying to my friends since 11/9:

His base of voters, egged on by foul statements in rooms across the country, did not have a single target. For over a year, their hatred was a revolving door. The did not discriminate: They hated black people, they hated women, they hated immigrants, they hated Muslims, they hated Jews, they hated gay people, they hated Hispanic people — and if you could be white and any of those things, they hated you, too.

In the numerous civil-rights movements of the 21st century, a degree of savvy about how to deal with racists, or homophobes, or Islamophobes, or sexists in isolation developed. But this expertise, from years (or in some cases, generations) of experience, was typically learned one form of oppression at a time. Progressives talk a lot about intersectionality — meaning, thinking about race and sex and class simultaneously — but Trump won the presidency by making hate intersectional. He encouraged sexists to also be racists and homophobes, while saying disgusting things about immigrants in public and Jews online. Hate, like love, is infectious, and it is contagious. And for so many, the adrenaline felt by blaming one group for one’s personal ills bled into blaming all the others.

Something the Trump campaign (I was originally thinking Bannon but this precedes him) hit on that we overlooked is that while I'd been taking for granted that the percentage of racists in this country has dropped considerably and that it's no longer possible to win the Presidency based on hatred against one group, it is possible to win by hating on all groups! Everyone hates someone. In that sense, Trump really has been a unifier.